D&D Blog Hop: Day 17

I don’t think I ever actually heard those words. My father loves The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books so he had a fairly healthy respect for fantasy literature. My mother didn’t voice any moral concerns about D&D – other than “wasting my time and money” on it but nothing about D&D being evil.

I remember the television movie Mazes and Monsters starring Tom Hanks about the college student who gets into “D&D” way too deeply and goes crazy. Again, I don’t think the message was that D&D was evil, but that obsession was dangerous. Or at the very least, the escapism offered by roleplaying games, coupled with the wrong personality, can be dangerous.

But it wasn’t until I was older that I read about people being concerned that the spellcasting and outsider summoning was evil. Especially in light of the fact that Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were such devout Christians and drew upon Christian stories to inspire their own tales. Even as a child I understood that Dungeon and Dragons was pretend – like Lego or G. I. Joe. But to consider it morally evil seems ridiculous to me, even today.

On a professional note, I must admit (“confess”) that I’m a Catholic who teaches Moral Theology to high school students. I am more concerned with the influence hyper-violent first person shooter video games like Grand Theft Auto have on young minds and their appetites than I do a pen and paper game of shared storytelling. Especially because so many of the players choose to be heroes and their objective is to thwart evil, not pretend to participate in evil.

For mature gamers there is the Book of Vile Deeds and other such gaming material that includes some graphic descriptions (and depictions) of some heinous acts. And in my experience some immature gamers use roleplaying to play out their darker fantasies (for the record this is more based on maturity and less based on age – I’ve played with some real immature middle aged guys who make bad jokes and their characters are mere caricatures of themselves). So in the end I think D&D, like almost anything, is amoral – that is, it is neither moral or immoral – but the player is the moral agent, not the game.

Matt W., aka Darkwarren, has been roleplaying ever since his older brother introduced him to the red box set when he was 7 years old. Since then he has game-mastered SSDC’s Battleords of the Twenty-third Century, WEG’s Shadowrun and Star Wars, and of course Dungeons & Dragons in a variety of forms. At thirty-four years old he takes turns on both sides of the screen with the group that he helped found in 2000 when 3.0 hit the stands and has met every week fairly regularly ever since. Currently they have been running a variety of the Paizo Adventure Path scenarios, so that’s his wheelhouse. He was almost famous when two of his adventures were green-lighted for possible publication right before Paizo relinquished the rights to publish Dungeon magazine.

Matt also has years if experience in improvisational comedy, fiction, and non-fiction writing. He is currently working and studying to attain a master’s degree in theology, to enhance his career as a religious studies teacher. Lastly, his greatest passion is his family, especially the three sons and dog that he shares with his wife in upstate New York.

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